


Provenance

by versayce



Series: Barry and Arthur Make Sex and Jokes [2]
Category: Justice League (2017)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-03
Updated: 2017-12-03
Packaged: 2019-02-09 22:49:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,795
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12898506
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/versayce/pseuds/versayce
Summary: “Okay,” Barry countered, “but how expensive do you actually think this chair we just ruined was?"“Probably nowhere near as expensive as this rug,” Arthur told him, grabbing Barry by the waist and rolling them both until they were clear of the chair debris. “And we’re definitely gonna ruin that, too.”A cautionary tale about filling your superhero base of operations with priceless antiques, and then introducing into it two individuals whose only goal in life, it seems, is to fuck until they both expire. Don't be like Bruce. Buy IKEA.





	Provenance

**Author's Note:**

> In a reply to a kind comment on my previous masterpiece, [‘Angry Merman and The Accidents’](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12860319), I said, _“If I ever write a follow-up it's just going to be a tragic inventory of every piece of imported European furniture Arthur destroys by fucking Barry against it.”_ This is that follow-up. You should read the previous fic first if you’re deeply invested in context, but otherwise you can skip it cause all you need you know is that Barry and Arthur are fucking. [Same disclaimer as before: I don't actually know anything about the DCEU, I only went to to see Justice League for Momoa and Miller (okay and Gadot) so please just lay me down in the tall grass and let me do my stuff.]

 

The mirror was an enormous French antique with cloudy mercury-backed glass, ostentatious frills of giltwood, and a price tag to match. ‘Palatial,’ Bruce’s buyer had said. It took three grown superheroes to collect it from the foyer, where the disembodied security system voice had instructed the delivery company to kindly leave it and then depart the way they had arrived, no loitering please – the Hall of Justice was not currently open to the public. Thank you for your understanding.

Arthur had insisted he could carry the mirror on his own, but Bruce had insisted in return that the wood was fragile, so an even distribution of the glass’s weight across the frame was of the utmost importance while the piece was in transit. ‘The piece’, he'd called it.

“Piece of something,” Arthur grumbled, irreverent in the face of fine Regency craftsmanship.

They angled it through doorways, turned it this way and that down hallways, and kept it level on the stairs like a crack team of pro mirror movers. Arthur had one end of it, and Vic the other, while Bruce hovered on the periphery, ostensibly directing the whole endeavour but actually just getting in the way.

“Ok, now turn it this way— No, this way, like this,” Bruce said, demonstrating the manipulation of an object in three-dimensional space via a series of indecipherable hand gestures.

“Hold up, I’m not getting any of that,” Vic told him. “Can we take a break? My brain’s exploding in slow motion right now thanks to one of Barry’s stream-of-consciousness text assaults.”

“How’s he feeling?” Bruce asked. “Leg healing up alright?”

A blast from a dumb icicle gun had shattered Barry’s tibia the day before.

“Yeah, he says the leg’s as good as new after a full night’s sleep and about twenty burritos. Except now he’s bored because we left him out of all this exciting mirror maneuvering and he won’t stop texting me. ‘Hey Vic, you hear about the thing with North Korea?’ ‘Hey Vic, why don’t we ever have birthday parties for anyone in the League?’ ‘Hey Vic, what’s the best way to let someone know you want them to come make sex to you in a bathtub?’ Every three seconds, and all of it popping up right in my head like— Oh shit!”

Before Vic was even finished with that sentence, Arthur unceremoniously let go of his end of the mirror, turned around, and walked away. The poor palatial piece shattered into a sea of shards as soon as it made contact with the cold, uncaring marble floor.

“What the hell, Curry?” Bruce shouted after him.

Arthur raised a hand as if in apology, although it could just as easily have been a dismissal, and shouted back, “Something’s come up!”

Rolling his one organic eye, Vic said, “Yeah I bet it did,” then remembered that Bruce was standing right there.

Poor Bruce. His expression slowly shifted from defeated sorrow for the loss of his antique acquisition to something along the lines of mind=blown.gif. Vic watched him rewind the last few seconds in his head, tragically unable to curb his detective instincts even in situations where ignorance would have so obviously been the preferable bliss.

Bruce put it together piece by unfortunate piece, looking from Vic to the remains of the mirror to the doorway through which Arthur had disappeared, until finally he asked, “Wait, are they—?” and winced.

“They sure are,” Vic told him, then added, “Sucks about your mirror, though.”

***

Barry had a mouth full of cock and two thick fingers up his ass, mercilessly honed in on his prostate, when the chair holding him and Arthur decided it wasn’t going to do that anymore and fell apart. Two out of four legs buckled, an armrest splintered off, the back lifted away from the seat – it was, in short, a swift and precipitous full-scale disintegration of the object as a whole.

To be fair, the chair did try to warn them. It creaked, squeaked, groaned and wobbled under their combined weight. There was nothing more the chair could have done, short of acquiring the power of speech and telling them, ‘hey guys, you should probably take your vigorous humping elsewhere because I am right on the goddamn verge of collapse’.

And collapse it did, taking Arthur and Barry down with it. Lucky for Barry, he was cushioned by Arthur’s generously-muscled lap. Lucky for Arthur, Barry had the presence of mind to stop sucking cock at the first sign of trouble, and thus they narrowly avoided what could have been a heinous chomping catastrophe.

“Damn,” Arthur said from the floor. “Sure hope that wasn’t one of those Louis Cat-something chairs Bruce won’t let anyone sit in.”

Barry wrinkled his nose. “It did smell old. Like, really really old, in an expensive kinda way that— Ah!“ Arthur’s fingers were still buried in his ass, and for some reason he was trying to take them out. “Nonononono, we’re not done yet!”

“The chair seems pretty done, kid.”

“Pfft, It’s just a chair, and you break chairs all the time, a chair a week at least – more if Bruce is around. What difference does one more chair make? Come on, Arthur,” Barry whined, and leaned down to nibble on Arthur’s neck in a way he hoped was arousing.

“Real eager,” Arthur teased, then teased some more by scissoring his fingers inside Barry's ass and plunging them deeper. Barry actually keened at that, so Arthur did it again. “You love it when I make sex to you, huh?”

Fucking himself back against Arthur’s fingers, Barry managed to gasp out, “That was like— Fuck! Ah— Like seven hundred years ag— Nnh… Jesus, Arthur—”

“Never gonna stop being hilarious, though.”

Barry hummed out his disagreement, but his voice betrayed him by turning what he’d intended as a chastisement into a needy moan instead. Arthur curled his fingers inside him, and Barry’s eyes fluttered shut against the desperate feeling of wanting to come right that second, but also, at the very same time, to stay all stirred up and strung out like that forever.

Arthur’s other hand gripped the back of Barry’s neck, tipping his head down. “Look at me,” he said, so Barry did. Arthur's hair was all fanned out against the dark green of the ruined upholstery, like an underwater scene, and he wasn’t exactly smiling, but his face radiated a hungry delight that made Barry shiver.

“Eyes open,” Arthur growled, tightening his grip on the back of Barry’s neck, but it was a real struggle for Barry to keep looking, like blinking through liquid heat. He bucked against Arthur’s hip one last time, his cock sliding in the wet trail he made there, and then he pitched forward with a gasp. As instructed, he kept his eyes open, and oh man was he ever glad he did – because when he came, Arthur watched him shake through it the way a shark watches some poor flounder doomed to become its dinner, right before snapping it up whole. That look on Arthur’s face brought Barry’s heart perilously close to giving up on keeping time with the world on account of erotic exhaustion. He tried to catch his breath, then gave up and collapsed onto Arthur's chest to do some serious panting.

Arthur was kind enough to allow Barry to recover to a point where he was once again able to comprehend human speech before he muttered, “You came on my fingers,” in an awed voice that Barry had previously only heard him use when he said things like, ‘damn, that was good steak’, or ‘never been to space before’.

“Okay,” Barry countered, “but how expensive do you actually think this chair we just ruined was?”

“Probably nowhere near as expensive as this rug,” Arthur told him, grabbing Barry by the waist and rolling them both until they were clear of the chair debris. “And we’re definitely gonna ruin that, too.”

***

“Hey Vic,” Barry said, sounding a little out of breath and looking dishevelled in a suspiciously indecent way when he burst into the room. “What was that website you showed me, the one where you pick two things and it tells you the best way to glue them together?” He was holding a leggy little horse statuette in one hand and a dark slab of stone in the other.

“Um,” Vic said, and then, when his brain caught up with Barry – “This to that.”

“Doc com?”

“Yeah, dot com, Barry, but somehow I don’t think their extensive database includes a whole lot of info on ‘ancient Etruscan bronze’ or ‘petrified wood’. What the hell happened, anyway?”

As though in answer to Vic’s question, Arthur appeared in the doorway, looking just as dishevelled as Barry, but it was impossible to say whether his dishevelment was situational or just an extension of his usual air of indifference. The ravenous way his eyes followed Barry, however, was unmistakeable.

“Aha,” Vic said. “Never mind. Forget I asked.”

Arthur huffed and crossed his arms over his chest. “Put it back where it was and forget about it, kid. It’s not broken or anything, just— Not attached. Who’s going to notice?”

“Bruce,” Barry told him. “Bruce is going to notice. Because Bruce notices when I move the passenger seat in his Chrome-mobile a nanometer back, and he notices when you don’t wipe down the benches after you use them in the training room, and he notices when Vic changes the default dimmer settings for the voice-controlled lights in the bathroom by 2%, because we tried it, Arthur – 2% and the next morning he calls Vic up all, ‘hey you didn’t tinker with something that might have inadvertently affected the dimmers, did you?’ Inadvertently, he said, but he knew. Oh, he knew. Just like he’ll know about this.”

“Then we’ll get him a new horse,” Arthur said with a shrug.

Vic ran a quick search. “Bronze figure of a horse, Etruscan, circa early fourth century B.C. Lot sold at Sotheby’s four years ago for— Well, a lot more than either of you can afford.”

“Crown prince of Atlantis,” Arthur reminded him. “Got coffers for days.”

“I don’t want to hold this anymore,” Barry said, and handed off the horse and the base to Arthur. “My peasant hands aren’t worthy. How was I even allowed to be in the same room as this thing?”

Vic gave him a consoling pat on the back and said, “Us hoi polloi gotta be careful around these parts. Let that be a lesson to you, my destitute friend – don’t touch Batman’s stuff.”

“I wasn’t even touching it! I was uh— Sitting. Nearby. And then sort of— Wriggled a bit, and bumped it suuuuper gently with my butt.”

“Your butt?”

“Saying I bumped it might actually be an overstatement. It was more of a nudge. Barely a brush,” Barry tried, but couldn’t keep the momentum of self-deceit going. “Oh man who am I kidding, Bruce is going to make an exception to his no murdering rule and totally murder the crap out of me, isn’t he? This is the worst thing I’ve ever done. Ok, maybe not _the_ worst, but pretty bad, definitely the worst thing I’ve ever done with my butt, at the very least.”

“And on that note,” Vic told the both of them, “please leave.”

“But what about the horse?” Barry asked, just the tiniest bit frantic.

“Fuck the horse,” Arthur said. “We got more important shit to take care of.” Then he tossed the battered statuette aside and walked out of the room. Barry hesitated for a moment, but, inevitably, ended up trailing after him.

“We do?” He asked.

“Hell yeah we do. Gotta redeem your butt, don’t we?”

“And how exactly are we gonna―”

To Vic’s relief, that was as much of their conversation as he was subjected to before their voices died down around the corner. When he was sure they wouldn’t be coming back, he picked up the bronze horse and its base from the floor. He turned it over in his hands a few times, then stared at his right index finger until it transformed into a miniature plasma welder. With the horse fixed back to the slab, he gave it a little pat on the head.

“Better stay away from those two, buddy,” he said in a low voice. “They got no respect for history.”

***

Arthur took one look inside Barry’s room at the Hall and said, “Not a chance, kid.”

“What? Why?” Barry asked. Arthur couldn’t believe that he had the audacity to look offended.

“I’m standing here in front of a fucking bunk bed and you seriously feel the need to ask me that?”

“Okay, first of all, it’s not a bunk bed, it’s a loft bed, which is a completely different thing―” Barry said, then briefly flickered out of existence on one side of the room to reappear by the bed— “and it’s pretty darn sweet, actually. Look at all the space I’m saving under here!”

“Impressively economical,” Arthur said, but Barry didn’t think he really meant it.

“Aaaaand— Sturdy?” Barry tried, giving the frame a good shake – but not too good, because it actually wasn’t very sturdy at all and he was straight up lying to keep Arthur from leaving. The wholly unconvinced expression on Arthur’s face made it clear he had to sell it a bit harder, so he added, “Nice and sturdy for, you know. For sex. If you want to―”

“Ok, look,” Arthur cut him off, “I’m gonna go find some whiskey strong enough to help me forget I ever saw this, and then I’m gonna head to my room, where there’s a real bed. You can whoosh on over there and wait for me with all your clothes off, or you can stay here and hang out in your bunk bed until your virginity grows back in. Your choice.”

“It’s not―” Barry began, then changed his mind about the thing that he was about to say and vanished.

“Good call,” Arthur told the empty room, feeling pretty damn proud of himself for averting an obvious furniture malfunction in the making.

Sadly, the feeling proved premature; it turned out that two hundred year old wood lovingly carved in the Neoclassical style stood no chance against Barry saying, “I wanna be on top. And no touching,” before sinking down slow and sweet on Arthur’s cock. He was pretty serious about the ‘no touching’ rule, too – zipping away to the foot of the bed with the tug of a smile at his lips whenever Arthur so much as tried it – so the only place Arthur’s hands had to go was the headboard. There he dug his fingers into the wood while Barry rocked his hips on top of him, lazy and unhurried at first but then faster and faster, almost too fast, a wild pace, an animal thing, and all Arthur could do was fuck up into him and keep his goddamn hands on the headboard because the last thing he wanted was for Barry to stop.

Who needs a headboard anyway? What, exactly, Arthur wondered a moment after his orgasm resulted in the creaking implosion of a significant portion of his bed, was the point of a headboard? You don’t put your head on it, do you?

Even without it, the bed was still perfectly functional. A shake of the sheets got rid of most of the splintered wood before Arthur pressed Barry up against the footboard and sucked him off. The footboard didn’t make it through the night, either.

***

“Isn’t he a little young for you?” Diana asked, sitting at the other side of the table. She was dressed in one of her signature revealing-yet-intimidating outfits, tailored to tantalizing perfection as always.

“Is he?” Arthur asked in reply, the way one might respond to being told it was looking a bit foggy outside. He was going for ‘disinterested’, but Diana’s dark eyes boring right into the most depraved depths of his soul, in combination with her outfit, made it impossible for him not to squirm a little as he said it. Where was the rest of the Justice League anyway? Wasn’t this damn meeting supposed to start ten minutes ago?

Diana tapped the liquid-lacquered surface of the table with her pen. Once. Twice. The she said, “You are more than ten years his senior, are you not?”

“Am I?” Arthur tried, but this question for a question thing played even weaker the second time around, so he added, “And how many millennia did you already have under your shiny belt the day Bruce Wayne turned legal?”

“It isn’t like that with me and Bruce.”

“Not yet it isn't. But don’t worry, one day he’s gonna give up on making eyes at our very own flying embodiment of monogamy, and then you two can get kinky with your lasso or whatever it is you’re into.”

Diana cocked an eyebrow at him in a way that made it perfectly clear how disappointed she was with his juvenile antics, but an almost imperceptible blush gave her away. Arthur shot her a lewd grin. She frowned back.

“I am only wondering why you don’t look for someone a little more— Suitable. For you.” Diana studied him for a moment – a moment in which Arthur regretted his choice to just roll out of bed and show up that day. “It isn’t just a matter of age. He’s in a transitional phase, coming to understand his powers and his place in the world. And he is eager for what comes next, yes, but he is also unsure. Vulnerable. Do you see?”

When she was finished talking, she put her pen down on the flawless finish of the table with an audible click that carried in it a heavy suggestion of finality. She had come as close as possible to saying that Arthur was taking advantage of Barry without actually saying it.

Arthur shifted in his seat and leaned forward to rest his elbows on the table, looking straight across at Diana. This was just the kind of conversation that called for lots of intense eye-contact, he decided. His speciality.

“You ever have something uncomplicated in your life?” he asked.

Diana seemed a bit puzzled, but she didn’t look away. She knew how to play the uncomfortable stare-down game.

“I mean uncomplicated in a way that’s nice and simple. Something you don’t have to struggle for, or worry over, or even think about too much. Something that’s good cause it’s so easy.”

A brief air of sorrow clouded Diana’s eyes, and then it was gone. Yeah, she definitely had something like that. Once.

“For me, that’s Barry," Arthur continued. "Well, drinking and fighting and Barry: easy.” He couldn’t help but smile. “And not just _easy_ easy, though he definitely is that. Real limber too. Loose in the hips.”

“Alright, you’ve made your point. I don’t normally make it a habit to interfere in my friends’ romantic lives, but I worry that Barry―”

“You worry that I what?” Barry asked, suddenly just in the room. “You guys talking about me? That’s sweet. I think. I guess it actually depends on what you’re saying, but neither one of you looks like you’re about to kick me out of the League or anything so it’s probably nothing too horrible, right?” He finished his sentence and popped a few pecans in his mouth out of the generous fistful he was holding. His snacking was evolving in exotic new directions now that he had unmitigated access to a kitchen stocked to Bruce’s rich-guy specifications.

“You’re late,” Arthur grumbled.

“Nuh-uh. Diana said ten fifteen, so here I am, two minutes early even.”

“Funny, I coulda swore she said ten.”

Diana gave him an impossibly dignified smirk.

“Oh well,” Arthur said. “We had ourselves a nice little chat to pass the time. Say, kid, how old are you anyway?”

Barry’s face was buried in his handful of pecans, having apparently given up on eating like a normal human being. He came up for air, still chewing, and said, “Uh— 24? No, wait, was it September already this year? So 25 then. I’m 25. Why?" Then his face lit up. "Wait, are you guys thinking about actually doing the League birthdays? I thought everyone was like, ‘birthdays are stupid, Barry, cause we’re serious vigilantes who have no time for fun’.”

Arthur looked from Barry to Diana, who was tapping the table with her pen again, obviously judging him for going after a fucking child.

That night, bottle of Jack in one hand and dragging Barry behind him with the other, Arthur kicked open the door to the dark meeting room and shoved Barry inside.

“We shouldn’t be here,” Barry hissed, “doing this―” Arthur grabbed him by the belt and pulled him in to suck whiskey-stained marks along his neck. “Nngh, yeah, that’s— No, wait, stop, this is all kinds of sacrilege right here.”

“On the table,” Arthur snarled, pushing Barry back against it.

“What? No way, we can’t do it on The Table, not where the League sits down to decide matters of life and death, ok? This is so beyond wrong. I can’t even―”

Arthur pulled back to down the rest of the liquor, then threw the empty bottle at the floor and stripped off his shirt.

Barry blinked. He really really wished he could go back in time and slow things down so he could watch Arthur take off his shirt again in slow-mo. Better mark down the exact date and time on a calendar somewhere, he thought, so that if he does figure out time travel some day he’ll know where to go first.

“That’s so unfair,” Barry complained. “How are you so hot? With your hair and your shirt, or like, without the shirt, and your arms – oh man, your arms…”

“On the table,” Arthur repeated, and began unbuckling his belt. His voice was a low scrape of metal against rock that sent sparks up Barry’s spine.

“Yep, yeah, on the table, okie-dokie,” Barry said, and hopped up to sit on the perfectly polished surface, legs spread wide to make room for Arthur. “But can we please be careful? I think Bruce was saying this is custom made by monks in the Swiss alps or something.”

“Mm-hm,” Arthur lied, pushing Barry down. He didn’t like to think of himself as vindictive or petty, but he definitely broke The Table on purpose that night, just to get the sound of Diana's pen tapping against it out of his mind.

***

Marble. Marble was good. It was solid and heavy in an unbreakable sort of way, and felt nice and cool against the sweaty flush of Barry’s skin. This particular piece of marble – a column in the Hall’s enormous reception room – was especially good, on account of having ridges carved into it that allowed Barry to better hold on for dear life even as Arthur attempted to fuck that very same life right out of him.

To be honest, in that moment Barry didn’t think that being fucked to death by Arthur would be all that terrible. Might be a bit awkward for Arthur to explain to the rest of the League, but Barry wouldn’t care cause he’d be kicking back in the afterlife with a huge satisfied grin on his face.

Arthur had one arm leaned against the column and the other wrapped tight around Barry’s waist. With each thrust, each slick slide of Arthur’s cock inside him, Barry came closer and closer to breaking his own earlier insistence that they had to be quiet, because what if someone hears? Arthur’s arm loosened a little, and Barry almost breathed a sigh of relief before he realized Arthur had only done it so he could shove three of his obscenely large fingers into his mouth. When Arthur decided they were sufficiently wet, he reached down to wrap his hand around Barry’s cock.

It was too much.  Barry couldn’t keep back the embarrassing sob that came spilling out of him, his body on the verge of seizing up with pleasure.

Arthur was saying, “Yeah, that’s good, come on,” punctuating his words with the deep, rolling thrusts that Barry loved more than he loved running, more than he loved food, more than he loved life itself, probably. Arthur's body pressed into his back, trapping Barry against the marble, which was starting to warm up with the heat it leeched off his skin.

“Oh my god,” Barry moaned. “Ah, fuck. Oh god, oh shit―”

Everything began to buzz. There wasn’t enough air to breathe, there wasn’t anything solid to hold on to. He was coming apart, and it was terrifying and amazing all at the same time, every molecule in his body exploding from the inside out. Later on, he would remember thinking how flimsy the world really was, that all it took was the smallest push—

Barry came to in a pile of rubble. The column was a mess of shattered rock, and there was Arthur leaning over him, covered in dust, looking the most freaked out Barry had ever seen him – and he’d seen him face down a nine-foot tall alien overlord who shot beams of life-negating energy from his eyes, so that was saying something.

A while later, Barry was sitting on an examination table in one of the auxiliary labs, wrapped up in a blanket that smelled like Arthur, with electrodes attached to pretty much every square inch of his skin. He kept his gaze on the floor while Vic fiddled with the monitors and Bruce typed away at a terminal nearby. Clark was there too. For some reason.

“Come on, kid, it’s not that big a deal,” Arthur said, sitting down next to him and putting a warm hand on the back of Barry’s neck. “You can’t call anyone a true friend until they’ve seen you sprawled out buck naked on the floor.”

“That’s not even remotely true,” Vic countered, “but as much as I would have preferred not to have seen that, he’s right that it’s not a big deal. We still love you, Barry, so you can stop sulking.”

Barry burrowed deeper into the cocoon of his blanket and leaned back into Arthur’s touch.

“I’m not sulking,” he said. “I’m contrite and distraught for a very legitimate reason.”

Without looking up from his terminal, Bruce said, “Alfred’s already coordinating the installation of a replacement column. I won’t even take it out of your allowance.”

“It’s not that! Um, obviously I’m very very sorry about the column, but it’s— I could’ve killed him." Barry turned to look at Arthur, his face burning with shame. "Arthur, I could’ve killed you.”

Arthur shrugged. “But you didn’t. It actually felt pretty great, right up until it started raining rocks on my face. Kind of like fucking a hot vibrating electrified―”

“Okay, thank you, that’s enough,” Bruce interrupted. “You got lucky this time, no pun intended, but Barry’s right. It could have ended very differently. That’s why we’re all here at two in the morning, to figure out exactly what he did so that maybe he can learn to control it.”

“Um,” Barry said. “Thanks?”

“I know it’s not easy,” Clark told him. “To lose control in a moment of passion, it’s— Well, it’s not easy. Trust me, I know.”

Barry blushed so hard he had to look back down to the floor. Why was Clark even there? Why was he saying shit like ‘moment of passion’ with his earnest Superman voice when Barry clearly had reasons enough already to want to lie down on the floor and will himself to die? At least Diana was out of town on business. Frankly, that was the only thing that kept Barry from dashing down to the south pole, where he could live out the rest of his life alone in an ice cave like he deserved. But then he remembered the penguins – the creepy, creepy penguins – and resigned himself to trying to make it work in civilization after all, despite the riches of embarrassment he had to contend with.

***

Vic rushed into the library to find Arthur and Barry standing together, staring down at a messed up chandelier on the floor. So that’s what that crashing sound was.

“Please,” he said, “please please please tell me this wasn’t a sex thing.”

Arthur looked up at him with a smile so dirty that Vic probably had syphilis now.

Barry looked up too, and upon seeing Arthur’s disgusting smile he shouted, “It wasn’t a sex thing!”

“Oh Jesus, thank the lord, cause how would you even reach up there? Unless Arthur had a thing for throwing you or something, and you— Nope, no, I’m going to stop myself right there before my brain goes somewhere I really don’t want to be. So. Not a sex thing. But how in the hell did you manage to bring down three hundred pounds of crystal and brass?”

Arthur leaned down and plucked a tennis ball out of the wreckage, holding it up with a triumphant pride that Vic thought might have been somewhat misplaced.

“With that?” Vic asked, making his expression as dubious as the cybernetic implants would allow.

Barry’s hands flew up, so he could better explain. “You know how I did that thing that one time? That we will never speak of again? With the _bzzzzzz_ and the property damage? Well, I got to thinking that if I could take something apart like that, maybe I could take me apart too, just a little, just enough for something to pass right through.”

“Why would you want―”

“Because last week, when we were trying to keep people from being squished by rubble and fighting jerks with guns at the same time, it might have been useful not to worry about being shot. I was dodging the bullets, but I had to keep zipping around the same piece of ceiling so it wouldn’t crush a bunch of lawyers. I think they were lawyers. Their suits looked expensive.”

“Yeah, ok, I can see how it’d be useful to find a way to remain stationary under fire,” Vic conceded. “But―”

“But,” Barry interrupted, “when we decided to practice with a tennis ball, you know what Arthur and I totally forgot to take into account?”

Vic thought about it for a second, and then he had it. “Oh shit. The acceleration.”

“Yup. The tennis ball went through me alright, but it got a boost from the Speed Force along the way. And then it was mass times acceleration equals BOOM. It bounced off the concrete under the wood floor and went right for the chandelier.”

“Kinda cool if you ask me,” Arthur said. “We should weaponize that. No one would see it coming.”

“I never see anything coming with you two,” Vic grumbled.

Arthur’s syphilis-inducing smile was back. “That’s cause you always leave before the fun starts.”

True to form, Vic walked out on them. Behind him, the sound of Arthur’s thundering laugh was rounded out with a choked-back snort from Barry.

***

 

**BONUS ROUND**

 

“Happy birthday!” shouted a multitude of voices, just as the lights came on all at once in the dark room. In response, an involuntary defence protocol was triggered in Vic’s cybernetic parts, and a shockwave of energy exploded outwards from his body, sending furniture and people flying.

A moment later, someone spat out a breathless ‘holy fuck’ (Arthur, judging by the choice of words) and then Barry groaned and picked himself up off the floor, saying, “Ok, so maybe this wasn’t the greatest idea I ever had, but let’s not throw the concept of League birthdays out wholesale, okay guys? Just, maybe no more surprise parties?”

Victor stared dumbly at his teammates, mostly sprawled on the floor. Clark was still standing, looking like he really wanted to offer Diana a hand getting up, but he knew better than to actually do it so he just watched her anxiously out of the corner of his eye. The room was a mess of shattered wood and pottery and bent metal.

“Is this—?” Victor tried.

“Surpriiiiiise,” Barry sing-songed weakly. “Happy birthday, Vic. There’s cake.” He looked around. “Somewhere.”

A cold, sick shame rose up into Vic's throat. They threw him a birthday party, and he blasted them with, uh, probably some kind of sonic cascade. He couldn’t be too sure. He’d have to run diagnostics later. It was a good thing they were all a bunch of metahumans, or else—

“Oh shit,” Vic said, realizing - no, not all of them. “Hey Bruce, you ok?”

Bruce was slumped against a bookcase at the back of the room. His grip on consciousness appeared tenuous. “I hate you all,” he rasped out.

Arthur grunted his assent. “As the saying goes – hell is other people.”

“I met Sartre once, you know, at a party,” Diana said, brushing a stray strand of hair back into place. “Very unpleasant man. Followed me around all night asking if I would hit him.”

Bruce gave a weak little chuckle at that, then coughed up a mouthful of blood.

“I’ll get him to the hospital,” Clark said with a sigh, scooping Bruce up off the floor.

“And I’ll get some booze,” Arthur volunteered.

Barry did his nervous twitching thing, and tried to make words a few time before something actually came out. “Sorry, Bruce. This is pretty solidly my fault.”

Bruce tried to wave it off, but he couldn’t really move his arm, so he just said, “Don’t worry about it, kid,” which made Barry wince.

“Ok, thanks, but um, do you think you could maybe never call me that again?”

“What – kid?” Bruce asked, and Barry nodded vigorously. “You don’t like it? But Arthur calls you that all the time.”

“That’s kind of the problem.”

“You lost me,” Bruce said. What he himself had lost was quite a lot of blood, probably, most of it internally, but some was leaking out onto his external parts too, like the front of his shirt, the more he talked.

Diana said, “I think it’s a form of intimate address between them.”

“Intimate— Ah, never mind, I probably don’t want to know. Happy birthday, Vic. Sorry I have to leave early to get my organs unscrambled.”

“You should probably stop talking now,” Clark told him.

“Yup,” Bruce said, and kind of passed out.

“Who wants tequila?” Arthur asked, strolling back in with a few bottles under each arm. Barry flitted to the control panel by the door and mashed at the buttons until the sweet familiar opening notes of ‘December, 1963 (Oh, What a Night)’ came blasting out of the room's built-in speakers.

It was a very special time for Vic.

 

**Author's Note:**

> \- Listen to [Barry's party song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDxhugRKZ8g), okay?  
> \- [thistothat.com](http://www.thistothat.com/) is really a thing, 'Because people have a need to glue things to other things'.  
> \- Not once did I manage to spell syphilis right, not even this time. I hope that does not make me unqualified to write sex scenes.


End file.
